When they finally did ask again, 79% of Americans said they favor a public option.

What hasn’t really changed, and what everyone acknowledges, is that almost everyone opposes the pubic option. That’s the one where the insurance companies have you by the short ones, able to refuse you coverage for a pre-existing condition, deny your services with their own death panels, retroactively terminate you if you get sick and made a mistake on your application, and pretty much just build their profits into whatever coverage you get, because your life depends on it.

The problem is, the public option is the only real solution to the pubic option. There’s no way to pass regulations strong enough to ensure that you don’t end up with cheap, junk insurance that’s already putting people in the poor house (Try to remember the last time your auto insurance paid for anything). The public option will serve as that safety net, and despite even more recent rumblings that it’s been left for dead, the President can, must, and will make sure it passes.

Tonight, I introduce the postlet. The name might indicate a short blog post, but what it really is is a post that’s short on links and polish, and long on me mouthing off because I am constantly having my time wasted, so I’m really annoyed. I’m also including a random picture, because I like my posts to have a picture, but I don’t feel like thinking of one that goes with this post.

I’m not going to tell you who has been wasting my time today, because I want you to have the fun that comes with those “blind gossip” items, like, “Who’s the blonde starlet recently seen playing nude backgammon with that married entertainment lawyer?” or “What committee has press people who don’t, y’know, interact with the press?”

On a completely unrelated note, someone in the press is finally noticing how awful the $80 billion PhRMA deal is. Except not really. This Fortune article misses everything I pointed out in June, but does point out new awfulness that’s based on details that hadn’t emerged when I wrote mine. So, add this + this. Well, I guess now we know all we need to know about that story.

That week, I took extraordinary steps to determine if this was the case. I spoke personally with a White House Deputy Press Secretary twice, followed by multiple emails. I also spoke, personally, to the press official for the Senate Finance Committee, followed by multiple emails. There was no doubt as to what I was asking. I never got a response from either of them.

That Thursday, I asked Gibbs about it at a daily briefing:

Q Thank you, Robert. I have two quick ones on health care. The first one, in the speeches about the $80 billion deal with the pharmaceutical companies, I haven’t heard anything about negotiating price — Medicare negotiating price with the pharmaceutical industry. I wanted to know if that was one of the tradeoffs for getting this $80 billion was that we’re not going to pursue that now.

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, again, the structure of part of that agreement was to use a portion of that $80 billion to pay up to — for the pharmaceutical industry to pay up to 50 percent of the cost for a name brand drug for a senior that falls between the point at which Medicare Part D stops providing help, and when catastrophic coverage — I think it is $6,500, a little bit more than $6,500 — level kicks in. So filling in that — what’s commonly known as — ironically, in health care — the doughnut hole, about — that up to 50 percent of the name brand — the price for that name brand drug would be paid for, and I think that provides a hefty discount that will bear appreciable benefits for seniors all over the country.

Q Has there been an agreement not to pursue a Medicare –

MR. GIBBS: I don’t know the answer.

Q I’m talking about S. 330.

MR. GIBBS: What was that?

Q Senate bill 330?

MR. GIBBS: You’re 330 bills ahead of me on that. (Laughter.) I will check on it.

Of course, now, the New York Times reports that the White House confirms that the deal did include an agreement to kill price negotiation laws:

In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama administration had never spelled out the details of the agreement….A deputy White House chief of staff, Jim Messina, confirmed Mr. Tauzin’s account of the deal in an e-mail message on Wednesday night.

“The president encouraged this approach,” Mr. Messina wrote. “He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”

This is deeply disturbing on many levels. If Gibbs didn’t know about this provision after the deal was made, then it stands to reason that the President didn’t know, either. With the Senate Finance Committe stonewalling me about it, one could conclude that they kept the President in the dark about it until it was already a fait accompli.

The other possibility is that Robert Gibbs was left in the dark, a frightening prospect for a White House reporter, and for any American.

Beneath it all is the fact that the government dealt away our right to negotiate lower drug prices (just like any other large customer), and they did it for peanuts. This is a disgrace.

I emailed Gibbs and his deputy for an explanation, and am awaiting a reply.

TAPPER: Can I just ask a quick follow up? In June you were asked about the deal and whether or not the deal with PhRMA implied that the White House signed off on no other legislation, such as allowing Medicare to renegotiate with PhRMA. And you said you didn’t know the answer to that. Was it because you personally didn’t know or because the Senate Finance Committee hadn’t informed the White House of that aspect of the deal?

GIBBS: You’re asking me to recall why I didn’t remember something in June. I — I — that I don’t know the answer to. Obviously, the agreement that we have is — is in the confines of health insurance reform that’s being worked on right now.

This has seemed like a bad week for healthcare reform. Congressional Blue Dogs are doing their damnedest to kill the public option, and the White House seeming to backtrack on their support of it. While expressing strong support for it, Gibbs has consistently refused to draw a line in the sand on the public option, and this week, inched back a little.

If this were any other politician, I’d be throwing my hands up in disgust, because this is how these backslides start. The obvious interpretation is that the White House is innoculating itself from the public option’s defeat.

In Barack Obama’s case, though, this isn’t so obvious. I’ve spoken before about his unique political MO, likening it to the “rope-a-dope.” In this case, I hope, he’s being more of a chess player. Since I’m more of a Gnip-Gnop player, I haven’t got it all figured out yet.

It is important to note that my confidence in the President, to this point, is based on past performance, not magical thinking. He’s a progressive in triangulator’s clothing. I’ve been sure he was blowing it before, only to be proven wrong.

This time may be different, however. He was right to determine that momentum was key to passing strong reform. Already, this week, one poll is being used deceptively to claim support for a public option is slipping. The spineless sellout Blue Dogs think they’re in the driver’s seat. Opponents of the public option continue to pound the public with lies. Now, it seems like the White House is sounding the retreat.

If Barack Obama is the chess player I think he is, he’s got a plan to rescue the public option from the Blue Dogs. If I’m right, it will involve Rahm Emanuel and some blunt conversations about mid-term elections.

I don’t think that Barack Obama is a bad enough politician to take the disastrous hit of no public option when he’s got airtight majorities in both houses of Congress. On the other hand, he likes for it to look like the other guy’s idea.

Either way, I hope the President knows that defying his base, and 76% of Americans, is not an option. Time to use that powder.

GOP House Leader John Boehner has just sent out his crummy healthcare propaganda chart, which he cleverly throws everything but the kitchen sink into. Ha, ha, John, it’s a confusing mess! Score! You suck at making charts!

Now, it might be fun to get my own CD of clip art and make a comparable chart showing how our current system can be made to look like an even bigger pile of technicolor vomit, but I prefer a simpler approach. Here’s my chart, John:

Update: I told you so. Jump to the end for a statement the President released this morning, obviously in response to the WSJ article.

The Huffington Post is running the scare headline “WHITE HOUSE MAY CAVE ON PUBLIC OPTION,” linking to this Wall Street Journal report that seems to have Rahm Emanuel begging Republicans and Blue Dogs to punch the public option in the face:

It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Monday.

“The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest,” he said in an interview. “The goal is non-negotiable; the path is” negotiable.

What the frak, Rahm? Didn’t I just get done saying how you guys punked the Blue Dogs with the $611 billion HELP committee bill that includes a public option?

Oh! Oh! Stop the presses! New healthcare data is incoming! According to a new study from the Goldman School at the University of California, Berkeley, in a ‘worst-case scenario’, a ‘pay or play’ employer mandate in a national healthcare plan could cause the loss of 166,095 jobs. Don’t worry, proponents of universal healthcare – the ‘worst-case scenario’ is in roughly the same realm of probability as is my hair spontaneously combusting while I brush my teeth. In the case of the employer mandate, that dreadful scenario is dependent on such unlikely factors as companies not opting to pay the payroll tax, and small employers not being exempt. (Under the draft by House Democrats, those employers which decide against complying with the mandate would pay a penalty of 8 percent of their overall payroll, something few would want to risk.)

The study, conducted for the Economic Policy Institute and the Institute for America’s future, says that the policy would likely result in ‘significant job gains’, according to Phillip Cryan at the Goldman school. Both think tanks behind this study are liberal or progressive, and the study states that new jobs would be created by the government healthcare system in most situations.

Surprisingly, last Tuesday, Wal-Mart announced its support for an employer mandate, lending the idea the star brand power that only Wal-Mart can.

When boiled down to its component parts, this is basically just conservatives saying that a ‘pay or play’ employer mandate for health care will cause job loss, and liberals saying that quite the opposite is true. So it’s the exact same thing as normal, only dressed up for Halloween in science costumes. In short, nothing new here, just liberals promoting a progressive economic policy concerning healthcare while conservatives fear the worst and claim the economy and American taxpayers will suffer. Color me surprised.